I had seen more of the world, in a certain way, than Mildred,—that is, more of society, in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. The leisurely, easy-going life of a people to whom New England ideas and “isms” were unknown had been the limits of my social, and Presbyterianism and Episcopacy the limits of my spiritual, horizon. I had scarcely dreamed of the existence of any other way of looking at life among people in good society. A brisk canter on my red roan, with a gay company of young people, a good dinner party, plenty of bouquets and dancing and young men, with now and then a would-be-serious talk with some of the more studiously-minded of them apropos of German poetry or Victor Hugo,—this life I had known all about, and but little of any other. However, eight months previously, when reverses of fortune had cast my fate in Salem, Massachusetts, among a family of Unitarians who had been old-time abolitionists, and were now woman suffragists and zealous reformers in every direction, my conception of life had enlarged a little, and I was prepared not to be amazed at this radical, bookish Boston girl who upset all my previous theories of what a charming woman should be. She was charming; no one who had seen her sitting there, in her loose gown of a delicate rose color, her dark wavy hair falling around her shoulders as she gazed steadily into the glowing embers, her fine features outlined by the firelight, but would have thought her so. We had been laughing heartily over some droll accounts of my first New England experiences and the horror which I had aroused in some precise old maids by my frivolity, while I had been equally horrified by their radical theology. I thought that it was wicked for them to read Renan, and they thought it sinful for me to wear French corsets and moderately high heels. After a time Mildred and I began to talk of love and lovers, as girls will. I say “girls,” though I was six-and-twenty and she my senior. But in New England, where late marriages are the rule and not the exception, the term “girls,” as I have discovered, has an indefinite application. “Mildred, were you never in love?” I asked. I shouldn’t have dared quite so much as that, only somehow she had invited my confidence, and I had told her all about my love affairs. I couldn’t tell whether she blushed or not, for the firelight glowed on her face. At first I thought that she was offended, for she waited a minute before she answered, and we listened to the rain coming in great gusts against the window pane, and the omnibuses rattling over the paved street below. Mildred nestled a little closer to the fire and adjusted her cushions. Then she said slowly, as she stretched out her slender fingers before the blaze, “Why, yes, I suppose I really was in love, though I didn’t know it at the time.” “Good heavens, Mildred, not with Mr. Dunreath!” I cried; “you told me you never really cared for him.”